Her confused thoughts raced hither and thither. What would be the end? Would Valiant forget after a time? Would he marry—Miss Fargo, perhaps? The thought caused her a stab of anguish. Yet she herself could not marry him. The barrier was impassable!
She was still lying listlessly among the cushions when a step sounded on the porch and she heard Chilly Lusk’s voice in the hall. With heavy hands Shirley put into place her disheveled hair and rose to meet him.
“I’m awfully selfish to come to-night,” he said awkwardly; “no doubt you are tired out.”
She disclaimed the weariness that dragged upon her spirits like leaden weights, and made him welcome with her usual cordiality. She was, in fact, relieved at his coming. At Damory Court, the night of the ball, when she had come from the garden with her lips thrilling from Valiant’s kiss, she had suddenly met his look. It had seemed to hold a startled realization that she had remembered with a remorseful compunction. Since that night he had not been at Rosewood.
Ranston had lighted a pine-knot in the fireplace, and the walls were shuddering with crimson shadows. Her hand was shielding her eyes, and as she strove to fill the gaps in their somewhat spasmodic conversation with the trivial impersonal things that belonged to their old intimacy, the tiny flickering flames seemed to be darting unfriendly fingers plucking at her secret. Leaning from her nest of cushions she thrust the poker into the glowing resinous mass till sparks whizzed up the chimney’s black maw in a torrent.
“How they fly!” she said. “Rickey Snyder calls it raising a blizzard in Hades. I used to think they flew up to the sky and became the littlest stars. What a pity we have to grow up and learn so much! I’d rather have kept on believing that when the red leaves in the woods whirled about in a circle the fairies were dancing, and that it was the gnomes who put the cockle-burs in the hounds’ ears.”
She had been talking at random, gradually becoming shrinkingly conscious of his constrained and stumbling manner. She had, however, but half defined his errand when he came to it all in a burst.
“I—I can’t get to it, somehow, Shirley,” he said with sudden desperation, “but here it is. I’ve come to ask you to marry me. Don’t stop me,” he went on hurriedly, lifting his hand; “whatever you say, I must tell you. I’ve been trying to for months and months!” Now that he had started, it came with a boyish vehemence that both chilled and thrilled her. Even in her own desolation, and shrinking almost unbearably from the avowal, the hope and brightness in his voice touched her with pity. It seemed to her that life was a strange jumble of unescapable and incomprehensible pain. And all the while, in the young voice vibrant with feeling, her cringing ear was catching imagined echoes of that other voice, graver and more self-contained, but shaken by the same passion, in that iteration of “I love you! I love you!”
His answer came to him finally in her silence, and he released her hands which he had caught in his own. They dropped, limp and unresponsive, in her lap. “Shirley,” he said brokenly, “maybe you can’t care for me—yet. But if you will marry me, I—I’ll be content with so little, till—you do.”